Ruthless Knitting

If I continue my current trend of only posting when I think I have something worth writing about, there will be a lot of long silences around here followed by finished objects that seem to have sprung fully-formed from my needles. This is silly. Thus, an update.

I have been busy. Last weekend, I came up with a design idea for a baby sweater to submit to Gryphon Perkins in response to her call for submissions. Over the weekend, I knit up a prototype in some stash yarn and sent it off to Gryphon. She accepted it, so now I will have some pattern writing and sample making to do. I’ll show pictures eventually when I’m allowed to.

Meanwhile, I have been diligently trying to finish up two projects, neither of which I’ve ever shown you pictures of. The first is the Tedium Bathmat (aka Absorba from Mason-Dixon Knitting). I have been working a little bit on the bathmat every day, and I’m starting to run out of yarn, which is good. I’m a little worried that it won’t be quite as big as the hideous bathmat that it is meant to replace. But it will be as big as it is, and that will be good enough. I’m not about to buy more yarn for this beast, even if I could (and I probably can’t, given that I began knitting it more than a year ago with yarn that seems to have no Internet presence whatsoever).

Here is where it stands now:

It is not the world’s most beautiful bathmat, but it is not supposed to be. What it is supposed to do is harmonize all of the non-harmonious colors in our teensy master bathroom: the beigy walls, the peachy floor tiles, and the blue and green and gray tiles in the shower. I think it will do the trick.

I have also begun and nearly finished a February Baby Sweater from Elizabeth Zimmerman’s Knitter’s Almanac. I’ve admired other people’s February sweaters for quite some time and have been wanting to make the pattern. One boring day last week, it occurred to me that I had a large skein of sock yarn in my stash that would be perfect for this sweater (and not so perfect for socks), so I retrieved it and cast on immediately. I flew through the knitting while it was interesting — yoke, sleeves, and rejoining the body — and then got a little bored when I had to do five inches of the body in the lace pattern before a final row of garter stitch. I’ve got four inches done, so you can expect a finished object soon.

Meanwhile, here’s a somewhat blurry and unimpressive picture of it on the needle:

The yarn I’m using is quite lovely — hand-dyed and, I suspect, hand-spun as well. But it seems to be difficult to photograph. I will have to try hard to get good pictures of the finished sweater. Given that it is supposed to snow today and also tomorrow (!?!!), this might require some patience.

That about covers the things I’ve been slogging through. Now on to the things I’ve been daydreaming about.

The design workshop that I joined a few weeks ago has been engaged in an exploration of the possibilities of linen stitch, and I came up with two designs that I’m excited about. One shall remain secret, just in case it works out as something I can submit for publication. The other, however, I will divulge: I’m thinking of knitting a little baby tank/tunic for summer with a linen stitch top (to simulate smocking) and a stockinette bottom. I have four leftover balls of yarn that are candidates for the project, two of Rowan Denim and two of Knit Picks Shine. I have two adorable twin nieces who are the intended recipients. I have a strategy for knitting these from the top down that I picked up from Barbara Walker. I’ll keep you posted, and if it works out, I’ll share the pattern here for free.

Finally (see, I had lots to write about!), I found out the other day about the Jimmy Beans Wool pattern contest. I am intrigued. All the patterns submitted for the contest have to be done in yarns sold by Jimmy Beans Wool, and it just so happens that they sell Nashua Creative Focus Worsted. I’m thinking of submitting Buster to the contest, mainly because I want the prizes. I need to buy the Knit Visualizer software first, though, so that I can make the charts in a speedy fashion. (Some exploration of the world of chart making the weekend before last convinced me that Knit Visualizer is definitely the way to go.) It may take me a little while to scrape together the funds, but that’s okay, because the contest is ongoing.

Pattern: Clementine Shawlette by Michelle Rose Orne for Interweave Knits, Spring 07
Size: 11.25″ wide by about 63″ long
Yarn: Hand Maiden Sea Silk, color Sangria
Yardage: One skein (440 yards)
Yarn Source: Knit/Purl in Portland, Oregon
Needles: US size 4 bamboo straights
Notes: I am quite relieved to have finished this project so I can work on something else. The pattern is lovely and the yarn beautiful, but neither particularly inspired me. Maybe I’m not a lace knitter. Maybe silk is just not my thing. (Evidence for the latter: When I knit a few rows in waste yarn as my guides for grafting, I used a wool/silk blend and an alpaca/silk blend. Both gave me a little thrill that I didn’t get from the Sea Silk.) Maybe I’m just not a “shawlette” kind of person. For whatever reason, working on this project gave me little satisfaction. Still, now that it’s finished, I’m pleased with it. The grafted row blocked out nicely. I think this piece will make a pretty accessory for the (very) occasional wedding or fancy affair, to which I can wear it with a black shirt or dress.

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Other entries about my experiences with Sea Silk and the Clementine Shawlette are here, here, here, here, and here. Most of these posts mention the shawlette only briefly, but the final one is a tutorial on how to graft the two pieces together.

I’ve really been wanting to write a new post, but until today, I had nothing of interest to report. As of this afternoon, however, I have finished the Clementine Shawlette. It still needs a good blocking, but in the meantime I can at least offer a few not-so-fantastic photographs and a mini-tutorial on grafting courtesy of Lucy Neatby.

I knew how to graft before I encountered Lucy’s technique, but I couldn’t do it with much facility. A few weeks ago, I watched the Knitting Essentials 2 DVD (available here, and highly recommended) and learned Lucy’s approach, to which I am now a convert. Lucy says that she knows how to graft perfectly well off the needles in the standard way but that she prefers her method. So do I.

What Lucy suggests is that rather than graft the live stitches off two needles, you knit an extra inch or so in a contrasting color, run the waste yarn tail through the live stitches, and then use the first row of contrasting stitches on each piece as a guide for your grafting yarn to follow. Once you’ve finished grafting, you unravel the waste yarn.

I thought Lucy’s approach might be helpful with the Clementine Shawlette, whose pattern directs one simply to knit the last pattern row on each piece (which is garter stitch from the right side but includes some purl stitches) and then graft the thing together. Now regardless of the approach you take, you’re going to have an obvious seam down the middle of the shawlette. I wondered whether it was possible to graft in pattern to some extent. I didn’t trust myself to create a beautiful seam (or even a tidy-looking one) using my normal approach, but I had an inkling that Lucy’s would enable me to graft in pattern without really knowing what I was doing. It worked!

For anyone interested in giving this a try, here is what I did.

After completing the last pattern row for each piece, I changed to some green yarn of approximately the same weight and knit a single row in pattern in the green yarn. I then changed to a second contrasting color and knit another row in pattern. I continued in garter stitch for an additional four rows, broke the yarn, and used a needle to run the tail through all the live stitches while removing them from the needle.

Now I had two pieces that looked more or less like this. (Please forgive the quality of the photographs. I don’t have the proper camera for this sort of close-up.)

I then threaded my needle with a length of the Sea Silk — not the same yarn that was attached to either piece, but a new length — and lined up the two pieces. About an inch and a half in from one edge, I found two stitches that I wanted to line up above one another and used the green yarn as a guide to where to put my needle into each piece. Basically, you want to follow your guide yarn where it connects to your main yarn. But when the stitch dips down into your second color of waste yarn, you don’t follow it there. Instead, you follow the guide yarn on the other piece, connecting the two together.

Once you’ve done a few inches and everything seems to be going well, you can go back and pick up the other end of your yarn and use it to close up that first inch and a half. You don’t want to leave this job for last, because if it doesn’t line up properly, you’ll have to start over. (This is Lucy’s wisdom, not mine.)

The advantage to using Lucy’s method for the Clementine Shawlette is that it makes it pretty easy to graft tricky maneuvers like double decreases and yarn overs.* All you have to do is follow the guide yarn. Though I am extremely inexperienced with lace and an admittedly poor grafter, I got all of the decrease and yarn over sections to line up nicely.

Once I’d worked my way across in both directions, I could inspect both sides. On the top, the grafting yarn now covered the green yarn completely and formed a new row of stitches. It looked like this:

The back looked like this (but, you know, in focus):

All that I had to do then was pull the tail of the waste yarn out of the live stitches on each side and unravel. Since the grafting yarn had replaced the first row of green yarn on each side, there was no chance that my knitting would come apart. I just unzipped, and voila!

You’ll have to wait until tomorrow to see blocked pictures, but I’m fairly confident that I will be happy with the appearance of my grafted row. I’m also pretty sure that I would not have been as happy had I grafted the way I usually do. For this I have Lucy Neatby to thank.

In return for her tutelage, I will plug her Knitting Essentials DVDs: If you haven’t already got your hands on them, you should seriously consider doing so. They are full of excellent tips for new, intermediate, and advanced knitters alike, and it’s much easier to understand her visual directions than any directions you’ll find in a book.

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*If you have to graft yarn overs, I especially recommend using two colors of waste yarn. The guide yarn seemed to dip down into the second color of yarn at these points, and if I had been looking at only one color, I don’t think I would have been able to work out how to do the grafting.